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Etch from scratch – LAME

Who would have thought that in choosing “Export As MP3” from the File menu in Audacity would have instigated such a lot of learning.

In the last two hours I have learnt about another Debian repository to add to my sources.list, authenticating a public key, downloading and compiling a file from source, and some of the history of MP3s and related patents.

Installing Audacity was easy:

apt-get install audacity

I assumed that the creation of MP3s within Audacity was available as the item was available on the File menu, i.e. it was not greyed out or dim.

When I chose “Export As MP3”, I was prompted to provide a filename, then a message was displayed to say that I needed libmp3lame.so. I was then prompted as to whether I wanted to go looking for it in /usr/lib.

I had a scrat around /usr/lib and /usr/local/lib and did not find libmp3lame.so. I went back to the Audacity web site as I remember reading that LAME (Lame Ain’t an MP3 Encoder) would need to be downloaded and installed after Audacity. What I had read referred to the Windows version, but I thought perhaps I would have a go at installing a deb package perhaps called lame.

W: GPG error: http://mirror.home-dn.net stable Release: The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 07DC563 D1F41B907
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

So off I went back to the www.debian-multimedia.org web site to find the public key. I didn’t scroll right to the bottom of the home page, or look at the FAQ. Remembering that it was Marillat’s site, I decided to ignore the displayed error.

apt-get install lame

The following error was displayed:

WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!
lame
Install these packages without verification [y/N]? N
E: Some packages could not be authenticated

Should be enough to run Audacity. And doesn’t get you into dependency hell when you next dist-upgrade.

In fact, if I were you, I’d carefully remove the stuff you compiled manually, and instead apt-get the package… that way it won’t break when you go to the next version of the distro (although with debian’s glacial release cycle, you’ll probably have a new computer before you do that!)

Thank you for your feedback. I have looked again through the steps I took to see where I decided to compile from source. I think it was because apt-get lame appeared to only provide documentation, and perhaps I missed any instructions there were about installing additional packages with apt-get as you have listed.

I certainly will re-visit the issue from where I left off. But first, I’ll get the audio recording that I need to do out of the way. Also, I will need to find out how to as you said “carefully remove the stuff” I compiled and installed manually.

To be honest, I’m not confident about a distro upgrade and have always worked from a fresh install, then apt-get what I need when I need it. Configuration and custom set up can be a bit tedious, for example, setting up email accounts and importing archived mail, but overall I feel that I am starting from scratch with a clean install and can figure out any issues as I install them.

I may play with doing a distro upgrade on the previous system, once I’ve moved fully over to my new Debian Etch system.

Debian’s release cycle is a lot faster than my purchasing new computer cycle. If I don’t count the Sun box which I have had in parallel with three x86 boxes, that is three systems in 17 years 🙂